Why I like Thomas Lux

I just read an interview with Thomas Lux by James Heflin. I attended a reading by Lux a couple of months ago, which I enjoyed. Even before that, I enjoyed reading his selected poems. Judging by the interview, he is a poet whose aesthetics don't contradict his practice. I could quote the whole article, but, instead I'll just present the bits I most identified with.

Nietzche said about certain philosophers there are philosophers who are more afraid of being understood than they are of being misunderstood, and I think there are poets like that, a lot of poets like that, because if you did understand them, you would go, "Wait a minute, there's not that much here." The old emperor with no clothes thing. When that stereotype fools people, when they feel that they're not supposed to understand poetry because they're just not quite smart enough and it has to be explained to them by a professor, that kind of poetry I dislike, because I think it diminishes all poetry, all good poetry. And I think often what is termed "difficult poetry" or even "obscure poetry" is neither--it's really just arbitrary. There isn't much there. I think it takes guts to write lucidly, clearly as possible.

You know what? I have great respect for those people [slam poets], and I think they are one of the main reasons that poetry is gaining a wider audience. Those people are taking poetry back to its roots, its oral roots. They do want to be understood. They make it exciting, make a reading/performance exciting. Maybe they're not all the best writers, but I have a shelf full of books, hundreds and hundreds of books that are pretty boring in content and often incomprehensible. I'd rather listen to a good slam or performance poet any day than read that kind of poetry on the page, so I give them a lot of credit and support.

I'm not sure if there's any clichéd subjects, cause there's only a couple of subjects anyway. Love and death--pretty much all the themes of poetry fit into one of those two categories in one way or another. But I think there's clichéd language, there's clichéd images, there's clichéd ideas, maybe even clichéd ways of expressing emotion. But if there's any way I could deal with, say, a political subject like I do in "The People of the Other Village," which is dismay over the continuing cycle of violence for thousands and thousands of years, one is to try to be odd or fresh enough, and also not being afraid to have some humor in something that's terribly, terribly dark or serious.

Thanks, Thomas Lux and James Heflin, for bringing me a breath of fresh air.

Stand-Up Poetry

Two articles recently in the news, one on Mary Jo Salter, the other on James Tate and Brian Henry have got me mulling over once again the page vs. the stage.

The James Tate article didn't have much to offer, besides the point that his surrealistic poetry is now moving into prose poetry. The prose poetry is labeled "witty" in the article. Well, maybe "whimsical" would be how I'd characterize it. The performance of their poems seems to have been instrumental in forming an opinion of it. Of Henry, Adriane Hanson writes He delivered the poems with a rapid excitement that engaged the audience, and he spoke about what had inspired his writing. Of Tate, she writes His reading style brought the poems vividly to life and had the audience laughing for half an hour. He has a unique storytelling ability, and the poems he read were by turns startling and hilarious.
Ingrid Lane writes on one of Salter's poems that the piece offers a view of the humor Salter employs in describing scenes all her readers can understand... From serious to funny, our little group laughed and mourned with her verses. It would seem the Salter reading offered more depth. And I find much to like in her answers to the April 2001 Knopf Question-a-Poet Contest, especially positions I can identify with, such as:

I suppose the first thing I learn when I finish a poem is that I was able to finish a poem. I don't mean to reply flippantly: I mean that I genuinely fear when I write a poem that there won't be another one.

Much has been written about the importance of dreams to the making of poetry, but I'm even more interested in that blurry time you mention "between consciousness and sleep."...I've become particularly attached to the illogical thoughts one has in the minute or two before sleep or after waking....It's during such moments... that I try to elongate the fuzziness, and the attendant weird metaphors and wordplay, for as long as possible...One nice thing about reading the newspaper early: sleepy readers are more prone to misreading, and sometimes the misreadings jump-start poems...I guess I'd say that I do use literal memories in writing, and I do apply my conscious mind to crafting that artificial thing, a poem--but I hope that I have gotten myself thoroughly confused first.

Now here's the thing. I've flipped through the books of both Tate and Salter at the Odyssey bookstore, which is across from Mt Holyoke College, where Salter has been, and is down the street from Amherst, where Tate has been. I've had the oppotunity to see/hear either of them perform their work, yet I haven't. Why? Because when I've looked at their work on the page it hasn't grabbed me. I'm all for being accessible, and I think I like both Tate and Salter in theory, but in execution on the page, they just haven't struck me as compelling. And people are coming up to me, asking for copies of "The Pig", wanting me to read it again, etc., and kidding me that I'll become known as the guy who wrote "The Pig", which is a relatively accessible piece that gets a lot of laughs. I like to satisfy an audience, but is what I write to do that always suitable for putting into a book? I wonder if poetry publishing should ditch the books for some poets and just sell us recordings of live performances of their poems. Perhaps for some poets, or for some poems, that would be the better value for the poetry purchaser.

Creative Spark Fuels Active Sex Life

Robert Preidt writes that a study finds that artists and writers are busier in the bedroom than others. Well, yeah, because that's where I do a lot of my reading and writing...

An active sex life and creativity may go hand-in-hand, according to a new British study that finds professional artists and poets have about twice as many sexual partners as other people...

"Creative people are often considered to be very attractive and get lots of attention as a result. They tend to be charismatic and produce art and poetry that grabs people's interest," study lead author Dr. Daniel Nettle, a lecturer in psychology at Newcastle University's School of Biology, said in a prepared statement...

The average number of sexual partners for poets and creative artists was between four and 10, compared with an average of three for non-creative people. The more creative a person was, the higher the number of sexual encounters, the researcher reported in the Nov. 29 issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society (B).


Oh. Well, uh, then maybe I have a theory for poets' suicides. With advancing age, the odds must change for some people to an intolerable degree.